ON THE SHELF: The library’s newest page-turners

Published 8:00 am Sunday, January 15, 2023

This column was submitted by Evangeline Cessna, Local History Librarian at the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library.

This week the library is featuring suspense and thrillers from our New Adult Fiction collection.

Author Marc Cameron continues Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series with “Red Winter.” It’s 1985 and a top-secret aircraft crash in the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighter in the world and the Soviets would do anything to get their hands on the technology. The CIA in East Berlin is contacted by a mysterious figure who offers details of his government’s plans to get the technology in exchange for his own asylum. If it’s genuine information, then it’s too good a deal to pass up. With the East German police closing in on the defector, Deputy CIA Director James Greer knows the only many to go behind the wall to check out the information is Jack Ryan. Ryan is a former Marine and a top-notch CIA analyst who has been the architect of some of the CIA’s biggest coups. Will Ryan be able to cross the wall, find the defector and verify his information before both men lose their lives?

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“Night Shift” is the latest from thriller master Robin Cook. Colleagues-turned-spouses Dr. Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton are balancing their demanding forensic pathology work with family responsibilities. The last thing they need is the death of their colleague and longtime friend Dr. Sue Passero. Sue dies mysteriously in the hospital parking garage and an autopsy is ordered. As chief medical examiner, the job of assigning the autopsy falls to Laurie. She asks her husband to take special care and he accepts only to find nothing conclusive after his examination. Jack becomes determined to conduct an on-site investigation at the hospital even though it means violating the Office of Chief Medical Examiner’s rules. Jack’s simple inquiry soon turns into a cat-and-mouse game with a dangerous and deranged killer who could make sure Jack never performs another investigation ever.

Marshall Karp takes up the “NYPD Red” series with his latest “NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority.” Finding a single assassin in a city of 9 million people is no easy feat but finding five is virtually impossible. The NYPD Red team must investigate not one, but five murders. First, in lower Manhattan, a sniper’s bullet ends the life of a prominent citizen. Five miles uptown, a second high-profile victim has his throat slashed. These two are only the beginning. It seems a network of U.S. military-trained assassins is on the loose in New York City. Now that they are on their own, they’ve given themselves a new name Kappa Omega Delta — Killers On Demand. NYPD Red detectives Kylie MacDonald and Zach Jordan are called to hunt them down, but these mercenaries are well-trained in the art of escape, and they aren’t about to let anyone get in the way of fulfilling their contracts.

Peter Kirsanow takes up the mantle of W.E.B. Griffin’s “Men at War” series with his latest, “The Devil’s Weapons.” In April 1940, Dick Canidy and the agents of the OSS search war-torn Poland to find a rocket scientist who holds the key to the Nazi’s most dangerous weapon. The terms of the Soviet-Nazi Nonaggression pact state that Poland will be divided between the two dictatorships. When it’s learned that the Russians are rounding up enemies of the state in their occupation zone, Dr. Sebastian Kapsky manages to slip away. He spent years working with Walter Riedel and Werner von Braun in the early days of rocket science, but he refused to continue the work when he saw how the Nazis intended to pervert their work. That makes him the most knowledgeable person about German superweapons outside of Germany. Both the Germans and the Russians want him, but Wild Bill Donovan knows there’s only one man who can find him in the middle of a war zone and get him out safely — Dick Canidy.

Louise Penny’s latest entry in her Chief Inspector Gamache series is called “World of Curiosities.” It’s spring in Three Pines and everything and everyone is emerging from the harsh winter. Unfortunately, some things shouldn’t reemerge. As the villagers are preparing for a celebration, a young man and woman have reappeared in Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir’s lives. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them permanently traumatized. It was the first case to bring the two investigators together. Now the children have arrived in the village of Three Pines and Gamache wants to know why. He is worried that the wounds these two have suffered have festered and will erupt. When a 160-year-old letter written by a long-dead stone mason is discovered, the alarm in the village rises. In it, the man describes his terror when asked to brick up an attic room somewhere in the village. The room is found, and the villagers decide to open it. As the bricks are removed, they find a world of curiosities, but Gamache recognizes something else. There seem to be puzzles within puzzles, and hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge. In unsealing that room, an old enemy is released into the lives of the villagers and into the very heart of Armand Gamache’s home.